Lord of the Flies: Group Dynamics, Leadership, and Social Control

Introduction: Group Formation Among the Survivors

The film Lord of the Flies is both entertaining and intellectually rich, illustrating core concepts related to sociology, social psychology, politics, and human behavior. Few films address group formation, group structures, group identity, and group dynamics as overtly as Lord of the Flies. The film follows a group of military cadets whose plane crashes, leaving them to fight for their survival. The boys are inexperienced with leadership and unable to successfully create group cohesion. What could have been a group committed to shared goals becomes a fragmented, chaotic, and loose network of alliances with deadly outcomes.

Lord of the Flies demonstrates the most fundamental and early stages of group formation. Because the boys already knew each other from school, they had already formed a group identity. As a group, the boys are loosely connected with one another based on their shared backgrounds. It soon becomes apparent that their school connection is a secondary group — one to which individuals feel less personal allegiance than to the primary groups formed off-screen, such as their families and close friends back home. The boys are also collectively members of a survivor group, whose status as survivors is temporary. The ending of the film reveals that the alliances formed during the course of their time on the island were temporary and superficial, and therefore only secondary groups composed of voluntary associates. Voluntary associates form around shared interests and needs. In the case of Lord of the Flies, voluntary associations are based on the shared interest in and need for food, shelter, friendship, and other essentials of survival.